“We see the shift to distributed work as transformative as the shift to cloud or mobile,” says Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. “Our product is made for distributed work. Our customers have turned to Dropbox for flexibility with work since the beginning and post-COVID we’ve seen an uptick in demand. I see it making our opportunity a lot bigger. We’re in the first inning of this shift.”
Drew Houston, founder and CEO of Dropbox, discusses how the shift to distributed work is as transformative as the shift to cloud or mobile:
Shift To Distributed Work As Transformative As Shift To Cloud
Our product is made for distributed work. Our customers have turned to Dropbox for flexibility with work since the beginning and post-COVID we’ve seen an uptick in demand. Most importantly, in the long run, we see the shift to distributed work as transformative as the shift to cloud or mobile. I see it making our opportunity a lot bigger. We’re in the first inning of this shift. None of the tools we’re using were really purpose-built for this environment and that’s what we’re focusing on.
That shift to working from home happened in the most dramatic and abrupt way possible. No one designed it. So back in March, we asked ourselves what if we made the work from home experience really great? What new tools and technology would you design for this world? We completely reoriented our product roadmap around the opportunity. That’s really what we’re focused on. I’m really excited about some of the launches we have for our second half.
Dropbox Customers Tend To Employ Knowledge Workers
We certainly have customers of all sizes including a lot of small businesses. Clearly, we’re all keeping an eye on the macro environment. It’s a challenging environment, but in general, Dropbox customers tend to be businesses that employ knowledge workers that can work from home and so they’re relatively less disrupted. Dropbox is often essential to their business operations as opposed to discretionary because all businesses need to collaborate around content. We’re keeping a watch on all the trends but we’ve seen a lot of health and stability in the business.
We had a great quarter and we’re profitable. We had a bunch of great launches and we’re helping a lot of our customers with the shift to distributed work. These are the things we focused on. I fundamentally believe if you build great products and make your customers really happy your stock price will take care of itself in the long run.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston: Shift To Distributed Work Is Transformative
“We’ve partnered with the National Restaurant Association for a restaurant safety app called VirusSAFE Pro,” says Restaurant Impossible host Robert Irvine. “When you say you’ve done something, say you’re cleaning the refrigerator, and you’re actually outside smoking a cigarette, I know because of geotagging that you didn’t clean that when you said you did. It’s really about accountability of duty of care. What we’re trying to do is put back the consumer of customer confidence through transparency.”
Robert Irvine, celebrity chef and host of Restaurant Impossible, discusses the launch of his new app VirusSAFE Pro which helps restaurants and consumers monitor the implementation of safety protocols. Irvine says the key is restoring “consumer confidence” in restaurant dining:
VirusSAFE Pro App Helps Restaurants Stay Healthy
We’ve actually partnered with the National Restaurant Association for a (restaurant safety app) called VirusSAFE Pro. It enables checklist reminders on your phone so that COVID-19 safety protocols are done in a timely manner and all the protocols are completed. You think about standing operating procedures for restaurants especially in the COVID-19 times where we’re looking at masks and gloves and everything that’s clean.
We’ve all been to airports and restaurants where people say that things have been done and they actually haven’t. VirusSAFE Pro is an app for phones that also has a desktop which helps with mitigation. When you say you’ve done something, say you’re cleaning the refrigerator, and you’re actually outside smoking a cigarette, I know because of geotagging that you didn’t clean that when you said you did. It’s really about accountability of duty of care. What we’re trying to do is put back the consumer of customer confidence through transparency. That’s the biggest part. It’s simple. It’s easy to use. It provides verification of stuff done in real-time.
Right Now The Problem Is Consumer Confidence
It’s 99 percent fail-safe as opposed to a pen and a piece of paper. I can actually tell you where you are and what you are doing. This is the only consumer-facing app that when you’re verified and you’re using that system you can put a check and verified sticker in your window. A consumer can then take their smartphone use it on the QR code and find out exactly what’s been done for the last 24 hours or 48 hours of your protocols. That allows a guest who has two kids that are below three years old or an 89-year-old grandmother to feel safe to go back into your restaurant. Right now the problem is consumer confidence.
It’s tracking everything that we’ve done for two years or more. You know what it’s like right now, everybody’s saying I got sick in your restaurant. Now I’ve got this mitigation tool to say we have done our best practices and protocols and our duty of care to make sure you are your safest. There is no system that’s 100 percent clear but this is 99 percent that we can follow what you’ve done, how you’ve done it, and make you want to get back to a restaurant. If you don’t do this and this is a big don’t, we already are at 30 to 40 percent of failure with the restaurants that will not be able to come past this pandemic. That is a huge amount when we’ve got 11 million folks out of work.
Restaurant Impossible Reopen
I’ve just reopened six restaurants in three weeks in four states following COVID-19 closures putting in new practices and protocols to make sure that consumers are safe. You will hear more from me regarding this on my TV show Restaurant Impossible Reopen which you’ll see very soon. It’s really important that we take these protocols seriously.
Robert Irvine: New App Makes It Possible For Restaurants To Reopen Safely
“Today is going to be a truly historic day for the Mac,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook at their at the Worldwide Developers Conference. “Today we are going to tell you about some really big changes, how we are going to take the Mac to a whole new level. From the very beginning, the Mac redefined the entire computer industry. The Mac has always been about innovation and boldly pushing things forward, embracing big changes to stay at the forefront of personal computing.”
The Mac has had three major transitions in its history. The move to PowerPC, the transition to macOS X, and the move to Intel. Now it’s time for a huge leap forward for the Mac. Today is the day that we are announcing that the Mac is transitioning to our own Apple Silicon. When we make bold changes it’s for one simple yet powerful reason… so we can make much better products. When we look ahead we envision some major new products and transitioning to our own custom silicon is what will enable us to bring them to life.
At Apple, integrating hardware and software is fundamental to everything we do. That’s what makes our products so great and silicon is at the heart of our hardware. So having a world class silicon design team is a game changer.
Apple CEO Tim Cook: Mac Transitioning To Our Own Apple Silicon
Bing has unveiled a new feature that gives users competitive backlink data for similar and recommended sites.
The announcement was made via the Bing Webmaster Team Twitter account:
Backlinks is back in the new Bing Webmaster Tools https://bing.com/webmasters/backlinks… ! Backlinks not only for your site but also for other sites (tab Similar sites), including for sites we suggest. Have a look and give us feedback on this beta tool.
The feature will be a big hit with webmasters, as it will give them valuable competitive insight into other websites, while also giving Bing a significant competitive advantage over Google.
“Ecommerce exploded when everybody got their stimulus checks,” says marketing superstar Gary Vaynerchuk. “It reminded me how much of a materialistic capitalistic country we are. The numbers are through the roof on food and beverage and things of that nature. Obviously, apparel has been hit in certain ways also. But net-net this is a capitalistic materialistic country and people want to buy things so you’re seeing a ton of activity.”
Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia and host of his own “GaryVee” channel on YouTube with 2.6 million subscribers, discusses how ecommerce is booming in spite of the current pandemic:
Ecommerce Exploded With The Stimulus Checks
Ecommerce exploded when everybody got their stimulus checks. It reminded me how much of a materialistic capitalistic country we are. A lot of my businesses are in ecommerce and I was “micro happy.” But I was macro disappointed because I’m hoping that people learn how to save money during this time. With VaynerMedia, my marketing firm, we sit with a lot of Fortune 500 companies that have consumer brands and we’re very involved in a lot of their e-commerce businesses.
The numbers are through the roof on food and beverage and things of that nature. Obviously, apparel has been hit in certain ways also. But net-net this is a capitalistic materialistic country and people want to buy things so you’re seeing a ton of activity. Sports cards are a space I pay attention to. I can’t believe how well it’s doing.
People Still Think Another Stimulus Check Is Coming
I actually think the macro conversation is the way this is all playing out. It’s disguising some of the economic vulnerabilities because we’re still in this cocoon. People still think there may be another stimulus check coming for me. As soon as this is over I’m gonna get a job.
I think the most interesting part of this from a kind of thoughtful economic standpoint it’s kind of that first month to three months or four months after it gets back to normal-ish. I’m really eyeing February, March, and April of next year where I think that you could see a dip because people will say wait a minute we’re in something bad. Right now I think it’s fake to some people.
Ecommerce Exploded When Everybody Got Their Stimulus Checks
“If people can ride the subway and if people can go to Trader Joe’s and pack into all these different places we can start to open factories,” says legendary tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis during an interview on CNBC:
When we look at the issues around reopening it’s very confusing for people running businesses today and I think for Americans generally. We’re not allowed to go to the beach and we’re not allowed to play golf but we can take the subway. This is the incredible failure of our government from the federal level down to the local level to not be able to give basic instructions and to have a clear voice.
Somehow this has turned into a political issue which is the worst of all outcomes. You’re a Republican right-wing person if you want to go back to work. On the left if you let people go back to work you’re committing murder. It’s ridiculous. We have to take a much more measured thoughtful approach to let people go back to work who want to. I understand people are scared people and they can opt-out of this.
We’ve got a lot of people who work behind keyboards, some of them in the media, who really want to tell people they can’t go back to work when they have a six-figure job clicking keys on a keyboard. It’s not very realistic. Certainly, if people can ride the subway and if people can go to Trader Joe’s and pack into all these different places we can start to open factories.
If People Can Ride the Subway We Can Open Factories, Says Jason Calacanis
“You’ve got to bail everyone out,” says Expedia and IAC Chairman Barry Diller. “This is like when you’re picking losers and winners. Everybody is in the same position which is the world stopped for commerce. You see this when you drive down streets and you see big cities and small cities and you see nothing is open. They’re ghost towns. The damage that is being done every day is enormous. Everybody needs to be bailed out of this one-time thing and we’ll worry about paying the bills later.”
Barry Diller, media mogul and Chairman of IAC and Expedia, says that every business in the United States must be bailed out in an interview on CNBC:
You’ve Got To Bail Everyone Out
What we’re doing at Expedia is using the time to do a lot of the things that we were not able to do when we were running a hundred miles an hour to keep up with our growth. You can think of it as a small business writ large. And then one day the door closes. And if you’ve got a small business with nobody coming in you have no revenue. Well, travel-related companies have no revenue. Expedia, like many large travel companies, has a very very large cost base so we haven’t yet dealt with that specifically. The real planning inside the company is to come out of this stronger than when we went into it.
The bailouts of the airlines are necessary. Full stop. You’ve got to bail everyone out. This is like when you’re picking losers and winners. Everybody is in the same position which is the world stopped for commerce. You see this when you drive down streets and you see big cities and small cities and you see nothing is open. They’re ghost towns. The damage that is being done every day is enormous. Everybody needs to be bailed out of this one-time thing and we’ll worry about paying the bills later.
What has to happen is the fear has to decline
What has to happen is the fear has to decline. The fear of associating with other people. There are plenty of friends of mine who say I’m not going to go to the theater or I’m not going to do this because I’m afraid. Actually, now people are saying, even though you’ve been isolating for three weeks you can’t come over to my house, which is kind of nuts. Fear is the next thing that’s going to thaw. Until that happens, whether you test people on the way in or whatever you do, at some point everybody’s going to have to be comfortable being a foot away from other people. If that fundamentally changes then a huge amount of our infrastructure disappears, which I don’t think will happen.
You kind of have to get over it (the fear). You go into a theater and you’re sitting literally within inches of people, you go in thinking that no one is going come in with enormous toxicity. No one is going to come in who has got some terrible communicable disease and sneeze on you. You kind of just trust in that. We’re all too frightened right now. We’re gonna have to get over it or everything will change.
One Way Or the Other This Is Going To Be Over or We’re Over
When we see the damage that is being done everywhere we’ll really see in the second quarter (what’s happening). How can you get fair value? I absolutely believe that in a year or two from now this will be over. One way or the other this is going to be over or we’re over. But how can you value that today? I don’t think you can do it?
II think the streaming will be impacted by (the crisis) also. You go a few more months and while people say (that Netflix) and other subscriptions to entertainment) will be the last things they’ll cut because people feel they desperately need it to just get through the day but that is eventually going to take its toll. People truly will not have the discretionary income to afford it.
Cornoavirus Doesn’t Change the Dynamics of Anything
But it doesn’t change the dynamics of anything. You’ve got the competitors. Streaming has taken over the world. Hollywood is irrelevant. The only companies that have a true path, an absolute clear business model path forward, have nothing to do with the entertainment business. Amazon and Netflix. Everybody else, good luck to them. They may be able to build subscription services that may be profitable but that world has changed forever. I think this pandemic has nothing to do with it other than earnings that are going to be much less for a while.
Of course, there are opportunities (to invest in) you just have to have a very long view or sure-footed look at things as not only they are but as you think they will be. We’re looking at some very large potential acquisitions for IAC. This is the environment where if you are acquisitive you’re going to do the thing that for many years everybody’s asked for. Oh my God, everything’s over-inflated and prices are crazy. You can’t buy things for this or that without these new premiums. Well, you know what, that’s all gone. If you’ve got capital what could be a better time than to exploit what is a terrible downfall for many companies.
You’ve Got To Bail Everyone Out, Says Barry Diller
“There are some banks who are actively trying not to take applications and to minimize the number of loans they make through the program,” says investor Mark Cuban. “This is despite the fact that it pays a five percent commission for the loans made on the small businesses. It might take the Treasury Department really pushing some banks who were unwilling participants to start to push some loans out there.”
Some Banks Actively Not Taking PPP Loan Applications
You have got to execute on what you’ve already promised obviously. Small businesses have been told that this (PPP forgivable loan) was coming since the legislation was passed more than almost two weeks ago. The rush was more than the banks were able to handle. The banks have just got to do their job.
Part two to that is I think there are some banks who are actively trying not to take applications and to minimize the number of loans they make through the program. This is despite the fact that it pays a five percent commission for the loans made on the small businesses. It might take the Treasury Department really pushing some banks who were unwilling participants to start to push some loans out there.
Surprising That Banks Not Taking Advantage Of Opportunity
It’s kind of surprising to me because the reality is that the Fed has said that they’ll buy back all the loans. Plus on top of that, they’ll pay that five percent origination fee slash commission for smaller loans. So banks have an incentive and it’s a unique opportunity for banks to pick up new clients. Never in the history of banking has a bank been able to say to a small business, I’ll loan you money and if you increase or maintain your employment you don’t have to pay it back.
I really truly expected that forward-thinking banks would use this as a way to attract new customers because it’s a unique opportunity. But they just haven’t. It’s going to take some prodding, unfortunately, to really get the stimulus in the hands of those who need it. Also, unfortunately, even more so, it’s a race against time because a lot of these companies are looking at going out of business if they don’t get that money in their hands.
Mark Cuban: Some Banks Actively Not Taking PPP Loan Applications
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a memo in support of Zoom and the company’s efforts to improve its security.
According to Reuters, who gained access to the memo, DHS was addressing the recent issues Zoom has been facing regarding its security and privacy. The memo was “drafted by DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which screens software used by government bodies,” and circulated among the government’s top cybersecurity officials.
Rather than calling for a moratorium on Zoom’s use, as some companies and governments have done, the DHS memo sought to put officials’ minds at ease by emphasizing that Zoom understood the seriousness of the concerns and was working hard to address them. The support is good news for Zoom and an indication its recent efforts to beef up privacy and security are beginning to yield much-needed fruit.
“A $250 payment per restaurant (from Grubhub) doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s going to be a huge difference,” says Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney. “We’re looking at it as a stimulus almost because the way we’re rolling it out is a consumer gets $10 if they spend $30. So our $30 million dollars is going to transform into over $100 million dollars of food sales to restaurants across the country.”
Matt Maloney, CEO of Grubhub, announces a $30 million stimulus to restaurants in a discussion on CNBC:
Grubhub Rolls Out $30 Million Stimulus To Restaurants
A $250 payment per restaurant (from Grubhub) doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s going to be a huge difference. We’re looking at it as a stimulus almost because the way we’re rolling it out is a consumer gets $10 if they spend $30. So our $30 million dollars is going to transform into over $100 million dollars of food sales to restaurants across the country. That’s a big slug when everyone’s working really hard to try to put money in the hands of small businesses.
It depends on the market (in terms of how many restaurants are still open). In early COVID West Coast markets, we saw a dramatic dip in restaurants that went off the platform. Now they’re starting to come back on. You have New York and Detroit that are in the throes of the crisis right now and so you’re they’re peaking with about 30 percent of the restaurants off. But remember, we’re having thousands and thousands of restaurants coming on the platform for the first time so we’re seeing about the same number in terms of net. It’s just a transition.
Our teams are working around the clock. We tripled our most onboarding month ever of restaurants. We had 15,000 restaurants go live in March. We’re probably going to do more in April. It’s just an incredible intensity of need right now for restaurants. We’re doing everything we can to help them. With drivers, we launched contact-free pickup or drop-off. We also just launched, just last week, curbside pickup for the drivers to make sure there are two layers of protection.
There’s plenty of work on Grub and I know there’s lots of work on other delivery platforms as well. We have our own stimulus for our drivers too. If they get impacted directly by COVID we’re paying them. I know other platforms are also. And, of course, the CARES Act just came through with a lot of relief for gig workers also. Everyone right now is all hands on deck trying to help the restaurants, the drivers, and everyone impacted through this economic and health care crisis.
Fundamental Economics Are Still Intact
I am hoping for the best. I think that the fundamental economics of our society is still intact. There is a lot of demand right now for restaurants. If we can help restaurants get through the next few weeks or months, depending on how bad this is, they will come back, they will be there for our communities. If they can’t, then that’s going to be a real problem.
What we’re seeing right now is as the crisis bottoms out in the market growth does start to come back in that local area. We’re seeing the crises (at different levels) around the country in different markets at different times so we’re trying to dynamically manage that situation on the ground.
Grubhub Rolls Out $30 Million Stimulus To Restaurants, Says Grubhub CEO Matt Maloney
“In the first 60th percent of this quarter added 9,000 new paid customers,” says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. “That’s a net number. This is compared to 5,000 for the previous quarter and 5,000 for the quarter before that. That’s an enormous surge. We’ve also seen the number of messages sent per user up 25 percent. Suddenly people are discovering a lot of techniques that were available to them before that suddenly become mandatory.”
Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, discusses via Zoom on CNBC how the pandemic has doubled their pace of growth:
Customers Added Has Nearly Doubled
You think about what people hope to accomplish out of having a meeting. It’s often to get a decision made. It’s to update people on the status of projects. There’s a whole bunch of reasons to have a meeting. There’s an immediate obvious switch that goes off in people’s heads, hey we used to sit in the same room and now we’re at home, we need to have a videoconference. But the best way to support that work in getting the decision made, getting people on the same page, and knowing where you can ask the question is often better served by other methods. In the case of Slack, that’s channels.
In the first 60th percent of this quarter added 9,000 new paid customers. That’s a net number. This is compared to 5,000 for the previous quarter and 5,000 for the quarter before that. That’s an enormous surge. We’ve also seen the number of messages sent per user up 25 percent. Suddenly people are discovering a lot of techniques that were available to them before that suddenly become mandatory. When the only tools you have to get work done are meetings and email and meetings suddenly become a lot harder to pull off you begin to look for alternatives.
Right Now It Looks Great For Us
We look at what might happen on the small business side (on whether we will see sustained growth). There could be millions of bankruptcies and that will obviously affect us. We have a very healthy small business part of Slack. Enterprises can shut down spending. On the other hand, we’ve seen the surge in sign-ups so obviously people are seeing the need. We also see expansion in existing enterprise customers. It’s very hard to know how those two forces balance each other out.
There are other things to consider too. I’ve been talking to other software CEOs. What do you do when you’re not doing field marketing events to drive new customers? What do you do when your salespeople can’t travel? What do you do when your executive briefing centers are shut? How is that going to manifest in pipeline and growth in 3, 6, 9, 12 months? Right now it looks great for us but it’s impossible to say how this takes out over the year.
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield: We’ve Seen an Enormous Surge
According to a report on CNBC, startups may not get government money from the coronavirus relief bill if they have already taken venture capital or private equity money.
“So-called affiliation rules from the Small Business Administration could prevent startups from getting loans as part of that stimulus package,” says CNBC report Kate Rooney. “According to SBA rules, a startup should be affiliated with their investors. For example, if a VC backed company has 30 employees, it is grouped in with thousands of other employees at fellow portfolio companies.
“The head of the National Venture Capital Association tells me that startups don’t have access to emergency capital in the meantime and there could be waves of job losses for the countries 2.2 million startup employees,” says Rooney.
“There’s been a lot of advances in machine learning that take things that would have been literally impossible ten years ago and made those things much more possible today,” says Etsy CEO Josh Silverman. “With 62 million products for sale, picking for any given buyer the 20 or 30 that should be on page one of search results is a pretty interesting and pretty challenging task. The key is understanding what an item is with relatively little data and then being able to determine for each individual person how to personalize search results.”
Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy, discusses how Etsy has increased growth by standing out in a world of sameness and by employing machine learning technology to personalize the Etsy experience for their customers. Silverman talks about his strategy for success in an interview with Fortune:
We Started Doing Much Fewer Things Much Better
Etsy has never been more relevant. In a world where so many of our products are being commoditized and we’re surrounded by a sea of sameness, Etsy stands for something really different. I think it’s really important that we stand out in the world and I’m proud of what the team has done to achieve that. The definition of success was really clear. I think from day one it’s about growing the size of the pie for everyone. The actual tactics that it was going to take to do that we’ve learned together as a team over time.
When I arrived, there were maybe eight or ten different metrics of success that we all held relatively equally. I said there’s one metric that matters much more than every other, which is what we call gross merchandise sales. In other words, the total sales of our sellers. When we stopped saying what’s a good idea, what moves any one of these 10 metrics and started saying, what are the fewest things we need to do to really accelerate gross merchandise sales, we came to a very different answer. We started doing much fewer things much better. That’s really been the key to our success.
There’s Been a Lot of Advances In Machine Learning
Change is hard. When running a marketplace we have access to a lot of data and insights that each individual seller won’t necessarily have. Our job is to really look after the good of the whole and be willing to make some decisions that sometimes, in the moment, may not feel obvious to every seller but really do lift all boats and make our sellers as a whole much better off. We’ve really focused at a high level on doing two things really well. One, make it much easier for people to find great products on Etsy. And two, once they’ve found those products to actually buy them.
With 62 million products for sale, picking for any given buyer the 20 or 30 that should be on page one of search results is a pretty interesting and pretty challenging task. There’s been a lot of advances in machine learning that take things that would have been literally impossible ten years ago and made those things much more possible today. The key is understanding what an item is with relatively little data and then being able to determine for each individual person how to personalize search results. We’ve made leaps and bounds in the science of search and machine learning. That’s more relevant at Etsy than almost anywhere else.
The mission of Etsy is incredible. As the nature of work changes creativity can’t be automated. The role we play for creators and makers being able to harness their creative passions and power and turn that into a way to earn a living for their families is a mission that I think is ever more important in this fast-changing economy.
There’s Been a Lot of Advances In Machine Learning, Says Etsy CEO Josh Silverman
Microsoft is backtracking on plans to force Bing on Office 365 ProPlus users following pushback.
On January 22, Microsoft announced it would include the Microsoft Search Bing extension with Office 365 ProPlus, effectively making Bing the default search engine, forcing it on users whether they wanted it or not. Needless to say, the backlash was immediate and severe, prompting Microsoft to revisit their decision.
In a community post Tuesday, the company acknowledged the negative feedback it had received, and outlined the adjustments they are making.
“But we’ve also heard concerns about the way we were planning to roll this value out. Most importantly, we heard that customers don’t want Office 365 ProPlus to change search defaults without an opt-in, and they need a way to govern these changes on unmanaged devices.
“Based on your feedback, we are making a few changes to our plan:
The Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension will not be automatically deployed with Office 365 ProPlus.
Through a new toggle in Microsoft 365 admin center, administrators will be able to opt in to deploy the browser extension to their organization through Office 365 ProPlus.
In the near term, Office 365 ProPlus will only deploy the browser extension to AD-joined devices, even within organizations that have opted in. In the future we will add specific settings to govern the deployment of the extension to unmanaged devices.
We will continue to provide end users who receive the extension with control over their search engine preference.”
“Over 50% of everything that gets sold on Amazon actually comes from small and medium-sized businesses.,” says Amazon’s VP of Small Business, Nick Denissen. “Their success is our success so we’re definitely focused on doubling down on that. We have over 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses in the US who work together with Amazon to conduct their business. Those include our sellers, authors, and skilled developers. They’re just a very important part of the customer experience we serve up.”
Nick Denissen, vice president of small business at Amazon, discusses the huge impact that small businesses have on Amazon sales in an interview on CNBC:
Over 50% of Everything Sold On Amazon Is From Small Businesses
Over 50% of everything that gets sold on Amazon actually comes from small and medium-sized businesses. Their success is our success so we’re definitely focused on doubling down on that. We have over 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses in the US who work together with Amazon to conduct their business. Those include our sellers, authors, and skilled developers. They’re just a very important part of the customer experience we serve up.
The 58 percent I just culled out they are actually the part of the business that is growing faster than our first-party business. We definitely have our interests aligned with small businesses on all fronts. As I pointed out, 58 percent of everything that gets bought is from small and medium-sized businesses. Many customers don’t realize that.
Amazon Storefronts Shed a Little Bit More Light On Small Businesses
Last year, we launched Amazon Storefronts to shed a little bit more of a light on small businesses. Amazon Storefronts is essentially a curated shopping experience where customers can dedicatedly shop from local small businesses. They’re all US-based small businesses. When we opened that Storefront last year a little bit over a year ago we had 20,000 sellers. To date, we’re excited to announce that we actually have 30,000 sellers.
We’ve also developed special technology for them to share more content. They can actually share their story. Those sellers have reached 70 million customers in the last year and sold over 250 million products. I think those numbers speak for themselves that we really are helping and that small businesses can get discovered on Amazon.
Amazon Announces Small Business Spotlight Awards
Today, we’re super excited to announce our Small Business Spotlight Awards. We’re continuing to shine a spotlight on many of these exciting small businesses where they can share their stories. We’re announcing 18 finalists across three categories. There’s Small Business Woman of the Year Award, Entrepreneur Under 30, and Small Business of the Year Award. When we asked our sellers to nominate themselves for this process we actually had over 1300 nominations. Since it’s the first time we did it we really didn’t know what to expect.
Starting today our customers can vote until November 8th for their favorite small business in this category. One thing that we’ve learned is that customers do like to learn more about these small businesses, about their stories, and also other small businesses get a lot of inspiration from small businesses. We’re pretty excited to have these sellers on this journey with us.
Small Business Winner Will Get $80,000
We’re also conducting two live seller events in the US today where we’re enabling small businesses to meet customers and to actually conduct a sale. I just want to call out that one of the nominees, one of the finalists in the Small Business of the Year award, is Damhorst Toys and Puzzles. They are a multi-generational company. They’ve been in business for 48 years. They hand manufacture their wooden toys in Missouri and now they found their way online with Amazon. They’re growing and it’s great to see those types of companies.
The winner will get an $80,000 award so we’re pretty excited to have them continue to grow and prosper on Amazon. One of the things we hear from small businesses is it’s not easy to find the skill sets to help them drive an online business, in particular businesses who have started offline. That’s one of the areas we’re also looking at. How can we help small businesses on that front? So stay tuned on that.
Amazon VP Nick Denissen Says 58% of Sales Come From Small Businesses
“We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game,” says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie. “This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year.”
Zander Lurie, CEO of SurveyMonkey, discusses how the company is driving its massive growth by focusing on enterprise solutions that are sold by the seat, in an interview on CNBC:
The Category For Experience Management Is Massive
The category for experience management is massive. Companies today are differentiating their products and services by their ability to be customer-centric. Everybody has access to off-the-shelf software and you can buy keywords on Google and you can target folks on Facebook but the ability to really be sensitive to what your customers care about and want is critical. Usabilla is the solution that we acquired earlier this year. They have a customer in KLM Dutch Airlines who was able to improve their app experience by a 2.8 to a 4.2 rating using our product. It really is about, can your managers and can your marketers listen to that feedback, understand the bugs, and then deliver and take action. That’s what survey software can do.
We don’t compete with Adobe and Salesforce at all. Frankly, there are hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers who need to be buying enterprise survey software. We exist in the Salesforce ecosystem and really try and help Salesforce customers get better data and get sentiment data from what their customers really care about. Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, those are big systems of record. They provide you a lot of operational data. Where SurveyMonkey competes and thrives is delivering for customers that sentiment data. How am I really doing? What can we improve upon? That’s where we’re selling a solution into the Salesforce ecosystem and we partner with Salesforce in a really productive way. It’s part of the reason they bought into our IPO last year.
Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful
We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game. This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year.
We set about on our IPO last year and told investors our plan to make this business a lot more valuable. The two key driving factors first is to elevate our sales motion to sell directly to the enterprise. That has been wildly successful. We doubled year-over-year a hundred percent growth in revenue in the sales channel. We now have almost 5,000 customers, up 60 percent year over year. We now compete in that ecosystem and we have a really disruptive product. Consumers love our product. We’re now selling into the organization with a really talented sales team.
There’s Been So Much Account Sharing On SurveyMonkey
Our team’s product is the collaborative self-serve product. We have a unique opportunity here. There’s been so much account sharing on SurveyMonkey over the years and in the current security environment, we’re asking people to pay for their own seat. That has driven a really healthy paid user growth. We see continued growth in those two areas. As I said, growth for us we’ve accelerated growth now twenty percent year-over-year, but we do it a disciplined way. We’re still able to deliver over $13 million dollars of unleveraged free cash flow in the quarter. We’re just not a company that’s going to grow at all cost. We want to have both healthy growth and disciplined cash flow.
We use politics in a fun way to help get a beat on what’s going on out in the world. Just like we ask questions about if you are potentially interested in buying an electric car or what do you think of Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, we also ask questions of the two and a half to three million people on our platform every day of who might you vote for and what issues are important to you. That really does give us a particular read on what American consumers are thinking.
Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful, Says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie
There’s no doubt that virtual assistants and AI-based voice services are one of the next big things in the technology industry. Long the stuff of science fiction, voice-based computing represents the next leap in computer interface and usability paradigms. As a result, virtually all the major players are pushing ahead with development.
It should come as no surprise that Amazon, one of the biggest players in the voice-enabled market, has announced the Voice Interoperability Initiative. The initiative is an effort to standardize how voice-enabled products work and “is built around a shared belief that voice services should work seamlessly alongside one another on a single device, and that voice-enabled products should be designed to support multiple simultaneous wake words.”
Already, more than 30 companies have signed on to the initiative, including the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, Logitech, Qualcomm, Libre, Intel, Spotify and others.
“Multiple simultaneous wake words provide the best option for customers,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “Utterance by utterance, customers can choose which voice service will best support a particular interaction. It’s exciting to see these companies come together in pursuit of that vision.”
While the initiative’s goals look good on paper, there are some challenges. Notably, the idea of having multiple voice services working on a single device may not fly with some of Amazon’s competitors. Indeed, Apple, Google and Samsung are noticeably absent from the initiative.
In the case of Apple, given their strong pro-privacy stance, it’s unlikely they will want to put Siri on hardware made by a competitor. Similarly, Google may be hesitant to give up the control that comes with their Google Home hardware.
Whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: Voice-enabled services is shaping up to be another technological battleground between some of the biggest names in the industry.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that WeWork was in talks with T-Mobile CEO John Legere to take over at the office space company. Now, according to Alex Sherman at CNBC, Legere is not taking the job.
In many ways, Legere was a natural choice for a WeWork CEO. WeWork is being taken over by SoftBank, the parent company of Sprint. T-Mobile and Sprint are nearing the end of a merger deal years in the marking. With FCC and DOJ approval, the merger only has to survive a lawsuit from a handful of states. In the meantime, however, Legere is a known factor for SoftBank leadership, as they have worked with him throughout the merger process. That first-hand experience no doubt made him a top candidate for the job.
Sources familiar with the situation, however, said that Legere has no plans on leaving T-Mobile. The news is no doubt a welcome relief to T-Mobile investors. During his time with the company, Legere has taken it from a distant fourth place among U.S. carriers to a solid third place and growing at a record rate. Legere was also instrumental in helping get approval for the merger, and will be a steadying influence as the two companies combine.
It should be interesting to see how much T-Mobile can grow with the combined revenue, subscribers and spectrum of the two companies, not to mention Legere’s continuing leadership.
According to cloud security firm Akamai, cybercriminals are using Google Analytics to gauge the success of their phishing campaigns.
The report highlights that just over 56.1% of all websites are using some form of analytics, with Google the leading analytics platform with 20% market share. Analytics packages provide important information, including geolocation, browser type, operating system and more.
Akamai researcher Tomer Shlomo, who penned the report, said:
“As phishing has evolved over the years, criminals have learned that technical markers, like browser identification, geo-location, and operating system, can help adjust the phishing website’s visibility, and enable more granular targeting. In order to evaluate these metrics, kit developers use third-party analytic products, such as those developed by Google, Bing, or Yandex, to gather the necessary details.
“Akamai scanned 62,627 active phishing URLs of which 54,261 are non-blank pages that belong to 28,906 unique domains. We discovered 874 domains with UIDs and 396 of the UIDs were unique Google Analytic accounts. Moreover, 75 of the UIDs were used in more than one website.”
Before companies go ripping out Google Analytics from their sites, it’s important to know that Akamai believes additional analytics are the solution to the problem, helping companies trace attackers and mitigate the damage.
“Using analytics can help you understand the full scale of a phishing campaign, and defenders can use this data to compare with internal signatures, for a more rounded detection and remediation process. Analytical data also helps understand domain targeting approaches.”
IBM has announced it is developing the “world’s first financial services-ready public cloud,” and Bank of America has joined the effort.
While software companies have a long track record of making software tailored to a specific industry, it is a relatively new trend among cloud providers. Nonetheless, the financial industry is a good candidate for customized cloud offerings, given the privacy, security and regulatory concerns the industry must contend with.
IBM touted Bank of America’s collaboration and contribution to the effort, noting that it marked “the next step in Bank of America’s seven-year cloud journey and reflects the Bank’s unwavering commitment to the security and privacy of banking customers while also creating an opportunity to address the unique regulatory and compliance requirements of the financial services industry.”
“This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space,” said Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer, Bank of America. “This industry-first platform will allow Bank of America to use the public cloud, putting data security, resiliency, privacy and customer information safety needs at the forefront of decision making. By setting a standard that addresses the concern of hosting highly-confidential information, we aim to drive the public cloud to a safety level that is unmatched.”
While IBM has not committed to creating other industry-specific clouds, the company will no doubt be gauging the success of this endeavor and using it as a guide for the future.
Whenever Google updates, tweaks, replaces or improves its search algorithms, webmasters the world over anxiously wait to see how it will impact their rankings.
Google’s latest update, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), is one of the company’s most interesting to date. Last year Google “introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training,” or BERT.
The company is using BERT to better understand complex, natural language queries and return more relevant results.
“By applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information,” wrote Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search in a company blog post. “In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.
“Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’ matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.
“To launch these improvements, we did a lot of testing to ensure that the changes actually are more helpful. Here are some of the examples that showed up our evaluation process that demonstrate BERT’s ability to understand the intent behind your search.
“Here’s a search for ‘2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.’ The word ‘to’ and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn’t understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query.”
